America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  In that, Canada’s not alone. If the O’Sullivan thesis is flawed, it’s only because the Lumberjack Song could also stand as the postwar history of almost the entire developed world. To understand why the West seems so weak in the face of a laughably primitive enemy it’s necessary to examine the wholesale transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two. Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health care (which America is slouching toward, incrementally but remorselessly), government day care (which was supposedly the most important issue in the 2006 Canadian election), government paternity leave (which Britain has introduced). We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. If you don’t “go forth and multiply” you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs, like lifelong welfare, whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad category of self-gratification issues: we want the state to take our elderly relatives off our hands not so much because it’s better for them but because otherwise the old coots would cut seriously into our own time. Fair enough. But once you decide you can do without grandparents, it’s not such a stretch to decide you can do without grandchildren.

  I’ve always loved Lincoln’s allusion to the “mystic chords of memory” because it conveys beautifully the layers of a healthy society: the top notes—the melody line, the tune—are the present, but the underlying harmony is critical, too; it places the present in the context of history and eternal truths, and thereby binds us not just to the past but commits us to the future, too. Yet since 1945, throughout the West, a variety of government interventions—state pensions, subsidized higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything—has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that Continentals now exist almost entirely in a present-tense culture of complete self-absorption. In the end, the primal impulses are the ones that count. Robert Kagan’s observation that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus doesn’t quite cover it. The Lumberjack Song and the Shemale World get closer: we’re Martians who think we can cross-dress as Venusians and everything will be all right. And like some of the hotter-looking transsexuals on display at Toronto’s City Hall, the modern Western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect except its ability to reproduce.

  Americans don’t always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest of the developed world is: in Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is now somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion to be moved to Health and Human Services. Yet the secondary impulses are so advanced that most of America’s allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like “power.” In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that “the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.”

  No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: for many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. They’ve been supplanted by new measures of power, like how smoothly you fit in at the transnational yakfests (EU, UN, ICC, etc.). Yet in the long run this redefinition of the state is killing them. As Gerald Ford used to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: a government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back.

  That’s the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP in the United States. In Greece, the figure is 25 percent—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.

  This is the paradox of “social democracy.” When you demand lower taxes and less government, you’re damned by the Left as “selfish.” And, to be honest, in my case that’s true. I’m glad to find a town road at the bottom of my driveway in the morning, and I’m happy to pay for the Army and a new fire truck for a volunteer fire department every now and then, but, other than that, I’d like to keep everything I earn and spend it on my priorities.

  The Left, for its part, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it’s better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens as a community. It’s kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him. “Social democracy” is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. To modify Polybius, it’s “avarice” dressed up with “pretentiousness.” And it leads, in Europe and elsewhere, to societal “indolence.”

  Somewhere along the way these countries redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he’s happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.

  The problem with this is not only fiscal but moral. Canada, according to its former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, wields enormous “soft power,” in contrast to America with its anachronistic “hard power.” If you say so. But it seems to me the real distinction is more profound—between hard culture and soft culture. That shrewd analyst of demographic and political trends Michael Barone published a book called Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future. It’s hard to imagine anyone writing a book called Hard Canada, Soft Canada or Hard Europe, Soft Europe; that question got settled a generation ago. No Japanese soldier has been killed in combat since World War Two. That sounds very nice: they beat their swords into karaoke microphones and sang “Give Peace a Chance.” And, as a result, their country faces a graver existential crisis than it could ever suffer in battle.

  “Soft power” is wielded by soft cultures, usually because they lack the will to maintain hard power. Can you remain a soft power for long? Maybe a generation or two. But a soft culture will, by its very nature, be unlikely to find the strength to stand up to a sustained assault by blunter, cruder forces—like, say, those youths on the Antwerp bus, or the Muslim gang-rapists in France with their preferred rite of passage, the tournante or “take your turn.” On the night of September 11 Muslim youths in northern England rampaged through the streets cheering Islam’s glorious victory over the Great Satan. They pounded on the hoods—or, to use the quaintly bucolic locution of British English, the “bonnets”—of the cars, hammered the doors and demanded the drivers join them in their chants of “Osama bin Laden is a great man.”

  Try that in Texas, and the guy will reach into his glove box and blow your head off. Even in Vermont it’s an ill-advised tactic. But in Britain you’re not allowed to own a gun or even (to all intents and purposes
) resist assault. So the unfortunate burghers of Bradford went home cowed and terrified, and the Muslim gangs went swaggering off with their self-esteem enormously enhanced. The bullying, intimidating side of Muslim immigration in Europe seems to be largely absent in America, in part at least because the assertiveness of the individual American citizen makes it a riskier undertaking.

  New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his seventy-dollar TV. A North Country non–gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non–gun owner just like him: Washington, D.C., say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and security cameras.

  As with state gun control, so with state God control. A hyper-rationalist can dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of applesauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judeo-Christian culture. As the bumper sticker says, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. Likewise, if (as Europe has done) you marginalize religion, only the marginalized will have religion. That’s why France’s impoverished Muslim ghettos display more cultural confidence than the wealthiest enclaves of the capital.

  MORAL HEALTH

  In this long twilight struggle brought into focus by September 11, the hard cultures will survive and the soft won’t. In Europe, the soft culture is so pervasive—state pensions, protected jobs, six weeks of paid vacation, lavish unemployment benefits if the thirty-five-hour work week sounds too grueling—that the citizen is little more than a junkie on the state narcotic. Faced with the perfect storm of swollen pension liabilities and collapsed birth rates, even Continental politicians recognize the need to wean their citizenry off some of these entitlements. But the citizens don’t. What do they care if their country will be bankrupt in twenty years and extinct in seventy? Not my problem, man. Call me when I get back from the beach.

  In 2006, the Economist reported on the growing tendency of the state to use its power to direct your life in socially beneficial ways—to coerce you into not smoking, eating healthily, etc.—and concluded: “Its champions will say that soft paternalism should only be used for ends that are unarguably good: on the side of sobriety, prudence, and restraint. But private virtues such as these are as likely to wither as to flourish when public bodies take charge of them.”

  That’s correct. The ends may be “unarguably good” but they lead to other ends that are unarguably bad. It’s the case that in a general population some people will neglect their elderly parents and leave their children alone at home while they go off gallivanting. However, by making the government the guarantor of a comfortable old age and supervised day care, you don’t end such fecklessness. Rather, by relieving the individual of the need to have “private virtues,” you’ll ensure that they wither away to the edges of society.

  Modern social-democratic states are so corrosive of their citizens’ wills and so enervating in elevating secondary priorities over primary ones that most of them would not survive even without the Islamists. That’s a remarkable thought: Europe doesn’t need an enemy; it’s losing to its own torpor. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have, starting with your sense of self-reliance.

  There is one (partial) exception to the softening of the West: a nation that still breeds, still puts in a full work week, still maintains a vigorous military. And what’s the reaction of the rest of the developed world (plus the Democratic Party, the mainstream American media, and the “international law” groupies on the Supreme Court)? It demands America quit monkeying around and sign up to the suicide pact with the rest of ’em. Take Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer, former Great Thinker to the prewar Tony Blair, and one of the great gasbags of the new Europe. I hasten to add I say that not as a cheap ad hominem insult—or anyway not merely as a cheap ad hominem insult—but because Mr. Hutton is the master of the dead language of statism that differentiates the modern Europhile from most Americans.

  In his 2003 book A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World, Mr. Hutton is at pains to establish how much he loves the country: “I enjoy Sheryl Crow and Clint Eastwood alike, delight in Woody Allen….” I’d wager he’s faking at least two of these enthusiasms, and the third, Mr. Allen, is the man the French government hired when they needed a beloved American celebrity to restore their nation’s image in America. Only the French government could think an endorsement by Woody Allen would improve their standing with the American people. But, having brandished his credentials, Mr. Hutton says that it’s his “affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself.” Many Americans of Left and Right could write a book like that, but, as things transpire, the great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. This becomes explicit when he compares the American Revolution with the French Revolution of 1789, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism (boo!) of the thirteen colonies the French promoted “a new social contract” (hurrah!).

  Well, you never know. It may be the defects of America’s Founders that help explain why the United States has lagged so far behind France in technological innovation, economic growth, military performance, standard of living, etc. Mr. Hutton insists that “all western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist.” Given that New Hampshire, for example, has been a continuous democracy for two centuries longer than Germany, this seems a dubious postulation. It would be more accurate to say that almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Hutton has it, “the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society.” Precisely. And it’s the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Hutton calls “the primacy of society” that’s blighted the Continent for over a century: statism—or “the primacy of society”—is what Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the European Union all have in common. The curse of the Continent is big ideas, each wacky notion a response to the last flop: the prewar German middle classes put their hopes in Hitler as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks; likewise, the postwar German middle classes decided European integration was their bulwark against a resurgence of Nazism.

  True, after Fascism and Communism, the European Union seems comparatively innocent—not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European directives that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government. Europeans never feel obliged to defend their mystical belief in statism: though they claim to be post-Christian rationalists, it’s mostly a matter of blind faith.

  That’s why Will Hutton feels almost physically insecure when he’s in one of the few spots on the planet where the virtues of the state religion are questioned. “In a world that is wholly private,” he says of America, “we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us.” He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (i.e., the typical discussion panel on the Continent is comprised of representatives of the center-left, the far left
, and the loony left). “Europe,” he explains, “acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria.”

  “Public interest criteria”: keep that bland phrase in your head when you need to know everything that’s wrong with Europe. It’s code-speak for a kind of easy-listening tyranny.

  “Public interest criteria” doesn’t mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite—via various appointed bodies—decide what the public’s interest is for them. Which is why there are no Rush Limbaughs or James Dobsons on European radio. But you do hear a lot of Will Hutton.

  The real issue, though, is not whether you like Euro-statism. Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s kaput. The un-American activities in which Europe has invested its identity are deeply self-destructive. Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable—who wouldn’t want to live in a world where the burning political priorities are government-subsidized day care, the celebration of one’s sexual appetites, and whether mandatory paid vacation should be six or eight weeks? But they’re agreeable only for the generation or two that they last. And, as we’re about to see in demographically barren, economically ossified Europe, for good or ill it’s the primal impulses that count. Europe’s belief that you can smooth off the rough edges of Anglo-American capitalism and still remain wealthy has trapped it in societal structures predicated on false arithmetic whose disastrous consequences can’t be postponed much longer. Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.

  What then would happen if America were to follow Mr. Hutton’s advice and “join the world”? Well, those “40 million Americans without health insurance” would enjoy the benefit of a new government health care system and, like their 250 million neighbors, would discover the charms of the health care “waiting list”—the one year, two years, or more Britons and others wait in pain for even routine operations; the six, twelve, eighteen months Canadians wait for an MRI scan, there being more such scanners in the city of Philadelphia than in the entire Great White North. They’re now pioneering the ultimate expression of government health care: the ten-month waiting list for the maternity ward.